Group RP 𝐄𝐥𝐬𝐞𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 // Worldbuilding

[chap]

TABLE OF CONTENTS​

Overview
The Island and History

Locations

Non-Player Characters

Factions

Anomalies

Appendix

 

[chap]

ST. ELSE ISLAND
St. Else Island is a small, isolated island off the coast of Maine, far enough from the mainland to feel removed from ordinary life, but close enough to remain a lingering curiosity. It does not appear on most modern maps, and for many, it exists only as a name half-heard or a place easily overlooked.

The island is perpetually shrouded in fog. Pale mist drifts in from the surrounding Atlantic and seldom fully clears, softening the coastline, blurring the horizon, and lending the landscape a muted, half-dreamlike quality. Even on bright days, St. Else is dimmed, as though seen through a gossamer veil.

Nearly all of the island's residents (around one hundred people) live in the small harbor town, also known as St. Else. The town is a quiet settlement of weathered buildings, narrow roads, and salt-worn storefronts clustered along the Southern shore. Beyond town, the island gives way to rocky cliffs, dense woods, and lonely stretches of coastal terrain.

There is only one way to reach St. Else Island: a ferry from the mainland that runs once a week. Travel is infrequent, deliberate, and often dependent on the weather. Visitors quickly come to understand that St. Else is not a place you pass through casually; it is a place set apart, self-contained, and strangely difficult to leave behind.

---

HISTORY
Taken from the the writings of local historian, Elias Thorne:

"Most islands have beginnings you can point to cleanly. A charter. A founding date. A neat line in some ledger in Boston or Salem.

St. Else does not.

The earliest reliable records place fishermen here in the late 1700s; seasonal men, mostly, coming in the warmer months for cod and mackerel, setting up crude shacks along the southern harbor before returning to the mainland when the weather turned. There are older references, too: scattered mentions in ship logs and coastal surveys, but nothing consistent. St. Else has always had a way of slipping out of documentation. You'll find it absent from maps where it ought to be, or mislabeled as open water. Even the dates don't always agree. One coastal survey from 1812 references a storm in 1836; twenty-four years before it was meant to occur.

Permanent settlement came slowly. A handful of families stayed through winter. A church was raised. A small town formed around the harbor. By the early 1800s, St. Else was what it remains today: quiet, tight-knit, and remote enough that the rest of New England could forget it existed. It was in those early years, too, that the island's first lighthouse was raised. The waters around St. Else are treacherous in the fog, and the shoals off the western rocks have claimed their share of careless ships. The original tower was a modest thing; stone and lime, built by local hands with mainland assistance after a petition was finally answered.

That changed in 1842, when the Whitlocks arrived.

They were a Boston family of considerable means; old money, shipping interests, industrial ambition. The first to settle was Edmund Whitlock, who purchased much of the island's central hill country and commissioned the construction of Whitlock Manor, the large estate that still watches over St. Else from the ridge above town.

Within a decade, Edmund's sons (Charles and Henry Whitlock, respectively) oversaw the founding of Whitlock Industries, a factory built inland near the eastern woods. Officially, it produced maritime equipment: ropes, pulleys, specialized hardware for shipyards along the coast. Later, during the First and Second World Wars, it expanded into contracted manufacturing; parts, fittings, materials most locals never saw up close.

For a time, the factory was the island's heartbeat. It employed nearly everyone who lived here. It brought steady ferry traffic, supplies, visitors. St. Else was never prosperous in the way of mainland towns, but it was stable.

The Whitlocks remained... mostly.

The family line splintered over generations. Some returned to Boston society. Some married out. Some died young. But a branch stayed rooted to the island. By the 1930s, the manor belonged to Joseph Whitlock, Edmund's grandson, a reserved man who rarely appeared in town except for church on holidays. After his death, the estate passed to his only son, Malcolm Whitlock, who was the last of the family to oversee the factory directly.

Whitlock Industries shut its doors in 1965, or so the paperwork insists. Some islanders will tell you it closed earlier. Others remember men reporting to work there well into the seventies. Memory is a difficult thing on St. Else.

The official reason was simple enough: declining contracts, rising costs, the mainland overtaking island infrastructure. The world was modernizing. St. Else was not. No replacement ever came.

By the 1970s, the machinery had been sold off or abandoned in place. The workforce scattered. Young people began to leave in greater numbers, seeking college, work, lives that did not depend on tides and weather reports. Those who stayed did so out of stubbornness, inheritance, or the simple fact that the island was all they had ever known. Malcolm Whitlock and his family would remain in Whitlock Manor as well, seen less often with each passing year, their presence on the island becoming more rumor than certainty.

St. Else did not collapse. It simply... receded.

The ferry ran less often. The mainland's attention drifted elsewhere. The island became quieter, not with sudden tragedy, but with slow subtraction: one family moving away, one shop closing, one house left empty through another winter. Progress reached St. Else in fragments. A telephone line was installed, then went silent. Streetlights appears on one road and not the next. The island modernized unevenly, as if time itself arrived by ferry and sometimes failed to disembark.

Those who arrived in the decades after were seldom conventional visitors.

A few came for the scenery, for the novelty of fog and solitude. Artists with sketchbooks. Writers with romantic ideas of isolation. Couples who wanted to feel, briefly, as though the modern world had loosened its grip. Others came differently. Some were drawn by grief. Some by exhaustion. Some by the desire to start over in a place small enough that no one would ask too many questions. St. Else has, over time, become a quiet haven for the lost.

And, regrettably, it has also become known as a place where people go when they have made the decision to end their lives.

No one says that openly. We don't speak of it in the way the mainland papers do, with their blunt headlines and their hunger for spectacle. Here, such things are folded into the island's silence. Names are spoken softly. Doors are left unattended. The ferry horn is listened to a little longer than usual.

The island is, in many ways, self-contained. News comes late, if at all. Help comes slowly, if ever. Time moves differently when your world is bounded by water. Days have habit of blurring here. Dates become suggestions. The islanders accept these little inconsistencies the way one accepts fog: present, unavoidable, not worth remarking upon.

The old factory still stands, of course. Visible from certain roads, half-swallowed by scrub and pine. The manor still overlooks the town, though fewer Whitlocks are seen now, and fewer still are spoken of with any certainty. The lighthouse has been rebuilt more than once since, though the exact dates are, like so many things here, strangely inconsistent. Some records insist the current tower was completed in 1829. Others place its dedication decades later, describing keepers who should not yet have been born. Life continues in the spaces between what was and what remains.

St. Else endures. That's the simplest truth that I can offer.

It is a place that persists. Fogbound, forgotten, quietly pulling certain souls towards it, as it always has.

We do not advertise that, of course."

 

[chap]

"Some nights, the diner feels like the only real thing on the island..."​

- Marla Keene, night waitress​

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DESCRIPTION
Driftwood Diner clings to the island's rocky edge like a lantern left behind, a stubborn structure built too close to the sea. It is the kind of place that looks as though it's been standing there forever, not because it's old, but because the island cannot imagine the cliff without it.

The neon sign burns a steady red-orange above the roofline: DRIFTWOOD DINER, bright enough to stain the fog. On wet nights, the letters blur in the mist and seem to hum faintly, more beacon than advertisement.

Wide windows wrap around the front, glass always filmed with salt, catching the interior light and turning it soft. From outside, you can see silhouettes in booths, the slow movement of hands lifting cups, the brief shine of spoons and forks and knives. The warmth inside is almost convincing. It spills outward in long rectangles across the rocks, as if the diner is trying to push the darkness back.

The building itself is plain; weathered siding, an overhang of roof, a single door that sticks slightly in its frame. Wind worries at the corners. The sea below never stops speaking.

Inside, the air is thick with grease and coffee, the kind of warmth that clings to your clothes. The booths are cracked vinyl, patched more than once. The countertop is worn down to a dull shine by decades of elbows. Somewhere behind the wall, a fryer clicks. A clock above the kitchen runs, but not reliably.

People don't linger loudly here. Even laughter comes out muted, absorbed by the low ceiling and the constant hush of surf beyond the glass. The diner feels insulated from the world; not safe, exactly, but enclosed. Like a room lit in the middle of an endless night.

Driftwood is not grand. It's not remarkable. It's simply there. Waiting.

---

SUB-LOCATIONS
The Booth by the Window
The corner booth facing the sea. Islanders avoid sitting there after dark. Visitors tend to choose it without knowing why.

The Back Hallway
A narrow corridor leading to the restrooms and storage. The light flickers even when the power is steady.

The Kitchen Pass-Through
The small window where plates appear without fanfare. Sometimes, an order arrives before it's spoken aloud.

The Service Basement
Officially just for dry goods and an old freezer. The stairs down are steep and the air grows colder than it should.

---

ANOMALY
Driftwood Diner has a quiet reputation among locals: your bill will never match what you remember ordering.

A visitor might swear they only had coffee, yet the receipt lists clam chowder. Someone else orders eggs and finds "Two Toasts, Uneaten" printed beneath it.

Most unsettling of all, some receipts include items that don't exist on the menu; strange markings, ill omens, quickly scrawled warnings. The staff never react. They simply collect payment, smile faintly, and wipe the counter clean.

 

[chap]

"Some rooms feel empty even when you're inside them. The Harborlight has the opposite problem."​

- Sally Rook, proprietor​

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DESCRIPTION
The Harborlight inn sits only a few steps away from the dock, close enough that the scent of saltwater follows visitors up the porch stairs. For most newcomers, it's the first real shelter they see on St. Else; warm windows, steady lanterns, and a bright amber sign glowing through the fog: THE HARBORLIGHT.

It's a modest two-story building of dark shingles and wide glass panes, more welcoming than impressive, its light spilling outward like an invitation. A veranda wraps around the front, lined with rocking chairs and planter boxes that somehow remain tidy despite the island's weather. The inn is small, but not tiny: twenty rooms in total, all close together and simply furnished. Twelve upstairs, tucked beneath the pitched roof. Eight on the lower floor, facing the rear of the hotel.

The rooms are narrow, meant for short stays; thin curtains, iron bedframes, lamps that glow softly. Nothing luxurious, only enough comfort to let a traveler breathe a sigh of relief. Inside, the lobby doubles as a common room. It's warm with lamplight and old wood, filled with mismatched chairs, a long coffee table stacked with dog-eared books, and a stone hearth that smells faintly of smoke whether or not a fire has been lit. Guests gather here in the quiet clusters, talking softly, waiting for the island to feel less unfamiliar.

There is always a sense of careful attention in the Harborlight, as though the building itself is listening. Floorboards creak politely. Sound carries strangely, muffled at the edges. The air smells of lemon polish, wool coats drying, and the sea just beyond the walls.

The Harborlight is not where islanders stay. It's where the island places its visitors.

---

SUB-LOCATIONS
The Dockside Porch
The wraparound veranda just off the harbor path. Many visitors sit here on their first evening, watching fog swallow the water.

The Lobby/Common Room
A shared space of lamps, hearth-warmth, and quiet conversation. The inn feels most awake here.

The Upstairs Hallway
Narrow and carpeted, with twelve identical doors. Footsteps often sound as though someone is walking just behind you.

Room 12
Always unavailable, regardless of vacancy. The door is never locked. Guests are simply asked not to try it.

The Breakfast Nook
A small side room off the common area where simple breakfasts are served; toast, fruit, coffee. The same three seats are always warm, even before anyone sits down.

The Guest Bulletin Board
A corkboard with ferry schedules, handwritten notices, and lost-and-found slips. Occasionally, a note appears addressed to someone currently staying at the inn... written in unfamiliar handwriting.

The Sitting Alcove
A cramped little corner on the second floor with a single chair and a window overlooking the western coast.

The Basement
Low ceilinged, unfinished, lit by a single hanging bulb. Officially used for storage. The floor is always cold underfoot and the walls sweat even in winter. Some guests report hearing muffled movement below the boards long after midnight.

The Back Office
A small room behind the lobby common space. Paperwork, maps of the island coastline, old reservation slips. Guests swear they've seen their own name written down here before they ever signed in.

---

ANOMALY
The Harborlight Inn is known for one thing above all else: there is always vacancy.

Even when the ferry brings a full load of visitors, even when the registry looks crowded with names, Sally Rook will smile and say the same thing: "Of course. We have a room."

Twenty rooms. Twelve upstairs. Eight below. No more. And yet...

Guests begin to notice things. A door at the end of the upstairs hall that wasn't there yesterday. A number stenciled onto wood that looks freshly painted. A hallway that feels... longer. At first, it's easy to dismiss. Sleep comes poorly on St. Else. The inn is old. The carpets are patterned in a way that makes distance hard to judge. If one were to ask Sally Rook, she'd simply smile and say, "The Harborlight makes room."

As though it has no choice in the matter.

 

[chap]

"That light ain't for ships. Ships already knows wheres they are. It's for everythin' else."​

- Captain Brine, retired lighthouse keeper​

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DESCRIPTION
The lighthouse stands at the far edge of St. Else Island, perched on a steep crown of black rock where the land simply gives up and falls into the sea.

The headland is jagged and slick, battered constantly by wind and spray. Below, the Atlantic breaks itself against the cliffs in endless white violence, sending mist crawling upward in cold sheets. The air here tastes metallic. Nothing grows tall. Even sound feels stripped down to the essentials; water, wind, and the low groan of stone against weather.

The tower itself is built from dark, rough-cut stone, thick walled and narrowing slightly as it rises. Age has softened its edges. Salt has stained the seams. A narrow catwalk circles the lantern room at the top, its railings rusted, its metal always wet to the touch. The door at the base is swollen from damp, iron-banded and stubborn, as if the lighthouse resents being opened at all.

But what really draws the eye is not the lighthouse's height...

It's the light itself.

A lighthouse should burn bright white; clean, distant, practical.

St. Else's burns crimson.

The lantern glows a deep, unnatural red, rich as fresh blood behind fogged glass, and its beam sweeps slowly over the water like something searching rather than a warning. Each pass cuts the mist, turns the surf briefly dark, paints the cliffside in the color of an open wound.

On most nights, the lighthouse is only an ember in the fog. Up close, it feels like like a beacon and more like an eye.

Watching.

Making sure you're seen.

---

SUB-LOCATIONS
The Keeper's Door
A heavy iron-banded door at the base, beneath the main lighthouse proper. Formerly the dwellings of the lighthouse keeper, though keepers now usually stay in town. The key is kept somewhere in town, though no one agrees exactly where.

The Spiral Stair
A tight stone staircase winding upward inside the lighthouse. Footsteps echo strangely, sometimes returning a half-second late.

The Lantern Room
Glass-paneled, humming with heat. The red light inside is harsh and constant, as if it has never one gone out.

The Observation Walk
A narrow exterior catwalk circling the top. Standing there too long makes the island feel like its drifting further and further away.

---

ANOMALY
A lighthouse is meant to face the sea, but the light of St. Else does not always obey.

Some nights, islanders swear the beam turns slowly away from the water... and sweeps across the island itself, searching the treeline, the rooftops, the roads. As if looking for something that has wandered off.

Visitors who witness this phenomenon report an immediate certainty, cold and absolute: It has found them.

Worse still, the lighthouse logbook. Many keepers have reported waking in the morning to find its pages filled with entries from keepers long dead. Each one begins the same way: "THE LIGHT HAS TURNED AROUND". Beneath that, written over and over, "DO NOT LET IT SEE YOU."

It's said that those who stand in the beam too long begin to change. They grow quiet. Sleepwalking. Drawn toward the cliffs. And when the fog is thickest, some swear they see figures far below, standing on the rocks where no one could survive... all of them looking up.

Waiting for the light.

 

[chap]

"If'n you need somethin', you'll find it. If'n not... well, the island's got a way of suggestin' things."​

- Lyle Mercer, dockhand​

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DESCRIPTION
The shops sit at the water's edge beside the dock and ferry landing, three small buildings huddled together against the fog as if for warmth. They are simple, weathered structures; dark timber, stone foundations. The air here smells of rope, fish oil, wet wood, and the sea pressing close.

Fog rolls in low off the harbor, swallowing the edges of the shoreline until the shops feel suspended between land and water. Their signs, painted in careful gold lettering, stand out sharply against the gloom, the words too clean, too legible, as though repainted more often than necessary.

Few places on St. Else feel so plainly functional. These are not landmarks or mysteries or ruins. They're where people go when they need something without having to take the ferry all the way to the mainland.

However, sometimes the island quietly decides what that 'something' is...

---

SUB-LOCATIONS
Bait & Tackle
The leftmost shop, narrow and crowded with hooks, nets, and lures. Barrels of bait sit near the door. The walls are lined with fishing gear in strange sizes; some meant for catches far larger than anything the locals admit exists.

General Store
The center building, dim and packed tight with dry goods, canned food, batteries, soap, and old necessities. The shelves are uneven, the stock inconsistent. Visitors often notice items they swear haven't been sold in decades, sitting beside brand-new products as if time means little in the aisles.

Island Mercantile
The rightmost and neatest of the three, built of darker wood and stone, with hanging lantern by the sign. It sells postcards, tools, warm clothing, and small 'souvenirs' that don't quite make sense; hand-carved tokens, jars of gray sand, trinkets labeled only with dates.

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ANOMALY
Each of the shops are small from the outside. Simple. Shallow buildings dressed up against the harbor rock. And yet... anyone who has worked there long enough learns not to step too far past the counter. The back rooms, they say, are wrong.

A delivery man once followed the clerk through the curtain behind the General Store's counter and found himself standing in a space far larger than the building could possibly contain. Shelves rose into darkness. Rows of crates stretched away like an underground warehouse.

In Bait & Tackle, the storeroom smells sharply of the sea, even on dry days. The further in you go, the louder the noise of the ocean gets until you realize you're up to your ankles in tidewater, a distant lantern buoy bobbing in the impossible distance.

Island Mercantile has no visible storeroom at all. No curtain. No back door. And yet, customers sometimes glimpse a narrow, lantern-lit hallway behind the shelves, lined with doors marked only by dates; some long past, some not yet arrived.

The shopkeepers never comment.

 

[chap]

"Don't stare too long. They start to look back."​

- Ella Shaw, oldest living islander​

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DESCRIPTION
The Spires rise from the sea off the island's southern edge, two immense stone pillars thrust up from the surf like the broken teeth of something ancient.

Waves crash endlessly against their bases, white water exploding into mist that clings to the rock and turns the air cold and raw. The sea here is darker, rougher, as though it resents what stands within it. Fog presses low across the water, swallowing the horizon until the spires feel suspended in a world of storm and stone alone.

Up close, they're not smooth formations. They're carved.

Weathered by centuries, but unmistakably shaped; pitted rock folding into the contours of faces. Countless faces. Some half-erased, some disturbingly clear. Foreheads, lips, hollow eyes staring outward from the stone as if trapped beneath it.

The Spires do not feel natural. They feel like ruins. Or monuments. Or warnings left behind by something that didn't want to be forgotten.

---

SUB-LOCATIONS
The Outer Rocks
A ring of jagged black stone surrounding the Spires, only visible at low tide. Waves make them treacherous, but islanders sometimes leave offerings there.

The Narrow Channel
The strip of turbulent water between the two pillars. The current pulls strangely, as if draining downward.

The Face-Wall
A section of the nearer Spire where the stone is most crowded with features; dozens of expressions layered together, some appearing almost recent.

The Tidal Hollow
A shallow cave at the base, accessible only in rare calm. The inside walls are smooth, worn, and warm to the touch.

---

ANOMALY
The islanders insist the Spires have always been there. They also insist that the faces have not.

Storm to storm, the features shift. A fisherman will return after a season offshore and swear a new face has emerged near the base; sharp-cheeked, unfamiliar, watching the harbor. Others claim they have found their own likeness in the rock. Not carved. Not imagined. Simply present, as though the stone is slowly learning them.

No one agrees on how many faces there are. Counting is impossible. The longer you look, the more you find. Some of the faces aren't weathered smooth. Some look fresh, as though they have not finished forming yet. As though the Spires are still making room for more.

 

[chap]

"It's comfort, sure. Just don't mistake comfort for safety."​

- Father Mallory​

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DESCRIPTION
St. Else Chapel sits at the edge of the treeline, a small stone church nestled in a clearing where the fog gathers softly between the pines.

Its windows glow warmly most evenings, honey-colored light spilling out into the mist as parishioners come and go. A single lamppost burns beside the path, guiding footsteps along the curved stones toward the arched doorway. The chapel is most; weathered masonry, a narrow steeple topped with a cross, a roof capped with dark shingles. The building looks maintained and cared for. The steps are swept. The door is freshly oiled. Someone tends the flowers by the altar.

This isn't a ruin or a relic. It's the island's chapel, still in use.

Inside, the air smells of candlewax and old wood. The pews creak with familiar weight. Hymns are sung on Sundays. Quiet prayers are spoken on weekdays. Visitors will often find Father Mallory somewhere in the nave, arranging service sheets or speaking softly with an islander who needs a place to sit a while.

Behind the chapel lies the cemetery, tucked into the dew-kissed grass. Headstones lean gently with age, names softened by time. It's small, but never empty of fresh offerings; stones placed carefully, votives lit on certain nights, flowers that appear even when no one admits to bringing them.

The chapel is a comfort to St. Else. A steady presence. A sanctuary.

---

SUB-LOCATIONS
The Nave
A narrow sanctuary of worn wooden pews and soft candlelight. The air is always faintly warm, even in winter, and sound seems to travel strangely, as though absorbed before it can echo.

The Altar
Simple stone dressed in cloth that is changed weekly. Fresh flowers are almost always present.

The Vestry
Father Mallory's small side room, cluttered with hymnals, old records, and island notices. The chapel's registry books are kept here, carefully maintained.

The Bell Tower
A steep stairway leads up to the belfry. The bell is only rung for services and funerals... though some islanders insist they've heard it on nights when the chapel was supposed to be empty.

The Cemetery
Set behind the chapel in the grass, with weathered headstones leaning at odd angles. Offerings appear regularly; coins, shells, small scraps of handwritten prayers.

The Crypt Door
A locked door near the rear of the chapel, leading downward. Father Mallory holds the only key and discourages questions about what lies beneath.

---

ANOMALY
St. Else Chapel isn't just a place of worship. It's a boundary.

The fog that smothers the island behaves differently here. It thins around the chapel grounds, unwilling to press too close to the stones. Sound carries more cleanly within its walls. The air feels lighter, as though the island's weight is briefly lifted. Father Mallory insists this is faith, nothing more... but the flock knows better.

Certain nights when the seas rage or the clouds burst or the woods feel too near, the chapel doors are barred from within. Candles are lit in every window. The congregation gathers quietly in the nave, not for sermon, but for vigilance.

They pray in low voices until dawn... and outside, the fog disperses. It gathers at the edge of the clearing like a living thing denied entry. Shapes sometimes move within it, just beyond the lamplight, lingering where the cemetery begins. The chapel bell does not ring. No one speaks above a whisper.

When morning comes, the island resumes as if nothing happened. The Father's hands tremble slightly as he extinguishes the last candle. The chapel remains standing. For now.

Islanders say it's the only place on St. Else that the darkness hasn't fully claimed. Not because the evil isn't there, but because something inside those stone walls is still saying no.

 

[chap]

"You don't really walk into the woods on St. Else. You just eventually realize you've been in them for a while."​

- Gideon Marsh, hunter​

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DESCRIPTION
The woods are not a feature of St. Else Island. They are the island.

More than half of the landmass is covered by forest; sprawling pine and spruce, old hardwoods twisted by wind, dense undergrowth that drinks what little light manages to reach the ground. From the air, the town is only a small interruption along the coast. Inland, everything becomes a green-black canopy.

Trails run everywhere. Narrow footpaths worn down by generations of islanders, deer tracks that widen into crude roads, old service routes that once led to Whitlock Industries before the forest began reclaiming them. Some trails are marked with stone cairns or faded ribbons. Others have no markers at all and feel newly made, as though they appeared overnight.

The woods are deceptively navigable at the edges. You can walk for a time beneath dripping branches, listening to the hush of falling pine needles and distant surf. You can convince yourself it's ordinary wilderness. However, the deeper you go, the more the forest changes character.

The canopy thickens. The fog becomes heavier, clinging low between the trunks. Sound dampens until even your own breathing feels intrusive. Distances lose meaning. A clearing you swear you passed an hour ago may never reappear. Another may appear twice.

The woods feel old. Older than the town, older than the chapel stones, older perhaps than the island's own name. Some trees are scarred with symbols nobody remembers carving. Moss-covered boulders sit in arrangements too deliberate to be natural. The ground is soft in places where it should be solid, as if something beneath is hollowing it out.

This is where the island's secrets spread outward. A vast, living perimeter where strange things have room to grow, to hide, to multiply. The forest doesn't simply surround the town. It presses against it, waiting at the edge of lamplight. This is where monsters reside; not always seen, rarely understood, but felt in the sudden absence of birdsong, in the uneasy certainty of being tracked by something that doesn't move like an animal.

On St. Else, the woods aren't empty.

They're occupied and they're endless.

---

SUB-LOCATIONS
The Treeline Road
The last stretch of gravel before the forest closes in. Visitors often report the feeling of being watched the moment they pass the final lamppost.

The Pine Cathedral
A grove of unnaturally tall trees where the air is still and the ground is soft with needles. No birds nest here.

The Old Bunker
Half-buried concrete sunk into a hillside, its door rusted but intact. The islanders claim it was built during the war. No one agrees what war.

The Bunker Stairwell
A narrow descent into damp darkness. The smell grows metallic the deeper you go, like old machines left running.

The Sea-Caves
A network of caves where the forest meets stone. They breathe cold air at low tide and echo with water.

The Black Sinkhole
A soft patch of ground that gives way without warning. The forest floor here feels thin, as though something beneath is waiting.

The Moving Cabin
A small, weathered cabin that appears in different clearings at different times. Smoke sometimes rises from the chimney. No footprints lead to or from it.

The Hanging Clearing
A wide open patch where the trees are scarred with old rope marks. Nothing grows well here.

The Deer Path
A narrow trail used by animals and, occasionally, things that imitate animals poorly

The Listening Stones
A scatter of moss-covered boulders deep in the woods. If you sit among them, you begin to hear things you shouldn't; old secrets, voices of loved ones who've never set foot on St. Else, your name whispered back.

The Thicket
A stretch of forest so dense it becomes impassable. The fog inside is darker. The islanders do not enter, even armed.

---

ANOMALY
The woods do not behave like a singular place.

Trails do not remain where they were. Clearings drift. Landmarks refuse to hold still. The Moving Cabin is only the most obvious proof; appearing miles apart within the same week, as if the forest is placing it where it's needed. Deeper in, the rules weaken.

Compasses spin uselessly. Voices carry from the wrong direction. People hear footsteps matching their pace from just beyond sight. The farther you go, the more the woods feel less like wilderness and more like a system. A circulatory network, pulsing with the island's leftover mistakes.

This is where the monsters reside. Not always seen, but always present; shapes between trees, hunched silhouettes too tall, movements that stop the instant you look directly at them. This is often passed off by the locals as nothing but tricks of the light, an animal seen at the corners of your eyes, but the islanders still don't go too deep. Not without reason. Not without company. They speak of the woods the way one speaks of weather; something vast and indifferent that cannot be argued with.

 

[chap]

"That place isn't abandoned. It's just... unfinished."​

- Silas Crowe, former foreman​

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DESCRIPTION
Whitlock Industries sits inland, half-devoured by the woods, its smokestacks rising above the treeline like dead pillars.

From a distance, it resembles any old factory left behind by time: a sprawl of brick and rust, broken windows, collapsed roofing, steel gantries webbed with ivy. But the closer you get, the more wrong it feels; not in the way of ordinary ruin, but in the way of something sealed. The air around the factory is colder than the surrounding forest. Fog gathers here first and leaves last. Even on bright days, the grounds seem dim, the light dulled as if passing through smoke that isn't there.

The fence line has gaps wide enough to step through, but few do. The metal is corroded, twisted in places as though it was bent outward from within. Old warning signs remain bolted to posts, their lettering faded beyond legibility.

Inside, the silence is oppressive. Machinery sits exactly where it was left, coated in dust, as though the workers simply stopped mid-shift and never returned. Hallways stretch too far. Corners feel watched. Sounds echo, always returning thinner than they should.

Whitlock Industries isn't merely an abandoned factory. It's a scar that the island has carefully grown around.

---

SUB-LOCATIONS
The Yard
A broad lot of cracked pavement and weeds, littered with old pallets and rusted drums.

The Main Floor
The factory's open interior; conveyor belts, broken catwalks, hulking machines frozen in place like extinct animals.

The Administrative Wing
Office rooms with overturned chairs, water-damaged files, and bulletin boards still pinned with schedules that end abruptly.

The Loading Bays
Wide doors hanging crooked on their tracks. The smell here is sharp; oil, rot, and something faintly medicinal.

The Furnace Room
A soot-dark chamber where heat once lived. Even cold, the walls feel warm to the touch.

The Service Tunnels
Narrow maintenance corridors beneath the factory floor. The air grows damp, metallic, and close.

The Lower Levels
Stairwells descending into darkness. Some steps are newer than the rest, poured long after the factory 'closed'. A sign hangs on the wall above the entry to the stairs, still legible and barely affected by time, with only two words: KEEP OUT.

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ANOMALY
Whitlock Industries should be dead. No power. No staff. No movement. And yet, standing within its walls, visitors often become aware of a low vibration underfoot; a hum too deep to be sound, felt more than heard, like a vast machine idling somewhere far below.

Compasses misbehave near the lower stairwells. Flashlights flicker. Conversations fade into uneasy quiet without anyone meaning for them to. Some claim the factory is simply settling. Others insist it's not the building at all and that the factory is only the surface structure built over something older, something impossible, something that does not sleep.

The locals avoid speaking of the lowest doors. They will tell you Whitlock Industries was the island's pride once. Then, more quietly, it's where the island's trouble began to concentrate. As though the evil on St. Else does not come from everywhere at once, but radiates outward from one buried source.

And whatever is chained in the dark beneath Whitlock Industries, whatever is slowly dying down there, has not yet stopped dreaming.